


Squeeze Your Eyes Shut & Hold On

by kho



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Gen, Kidnapping, Rescue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-17
Updated: 2016-02-17
Packaged: 2018-05-21 06:27:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6041599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kho/pseuds/kho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Hey, hey,” the voice says, and it’s closer and they’re pulling on the chair in front of her, and she’s holding on so hard the corners of it are making her fingers bleed. “Gracie, sweetheart, it’s me, Steve, baby, come on."    (<i>Just a vision I had to see through.  No spoilers, takes place now/future/etc, whenever.</i>)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Squeeze Your Eyes Shut & Hold On

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys based on a few notes I've gotten I just want to clarify that I did not write this because I think Danny is incompetent but that I do think Steve would absolutely storm the castle by himself and lock Danny up to keep him safe. I do say Danny is a klutz but I did that for humor and easing of tension.

She curls herself into as little of a ball as she can in the farthest corner from the door, pulling a chair up against her which is no protection at all but it means there’s one more thing between her and whatever is out there with the shouting and the bullets and the explosions.

She’s been here three days, has refused to eat the food they’ve provided her, is weak and tired and dirty, and has cried and screamed so much there are no tears left and her voice is hoarse, throat scratchy.

She hears bang, bang. Bang, bang, bang. And then silence. Silence for a long time. The silence terrifies her even more.

Then there’s a slam, followed by another slam, followed by another slam, and then the door to the room she’s in is slammed open and knocking against the plaster hard enough for it to rain down on the floor.

“Gracie.”

She covers her head, rocking back and forth. “No, no, no, no.”

“Hey, hey,” the voice says, and it’s closer and they’re pulling on the chair in front of her, and she’s holding on so hard the corners of it are making her fingers bleed. “Gracie, sweetheart, it’s me, Steve, baby, come on.”

“Steve,” she repeats and opens one eye to see him, blood dripping down his face, holding his arm over his side, sweaty and dirty and the best thing she’s ever seen in her entire life, and she’s in his arms and sobbing and it turns out she’s got capacity for tears still. “Uncle Steve, oh holy shit, you’re here!”

“I got ya baby, listen to me, let me get these things off of ya,” he’s saying, pushing her back by her shoulders and giving her a quick smile as he pulls out a knife and starts cutting at the ropes binding her wrists and her legs. “You okay? You hurt? Did they hurt you?”

“I wanna go home, can we go home now,” she asks, tears streaming down her face. “Where’s my Dad?”

“Your Dad’s not here right now but I’m gonna take you to him,” he says, grabbing her hand and hauling her up to stand. “Can you walk? Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine, stop fussing.” She jerks her hands out of his and backs up. “Where’s my Dad? Is he dead?” He frowns and blinks at her and she balls her hands into fists and hits him as hard as she can in the chest. “Is he dead, Uncle Steve?!”

“No, Gracie, Danno’s fine, he’s perfect, he’s just worried about you,” he says, grabbing her and hauling her into another hug, speaking into her hair. “Hey, hey, I swear to you, he’s fine.”

“He said he’d always come for me, he said the only reason he’d ever not come for me is if he was dead,” she says into his shirt. “It’s been so long, I’ve been here so long.”

“I’m so sorry it took us so long sweetheart,” Steve says, tears in his eyes. “We did everything, we tried everything, we came as soon as we possibly could.”

“I know,” she says, nodding and pulling back, reaching up to wipe at her face. “I know, I was just so scared.”

“Listen, your Dad’s gonna be real pissed at me when we get to him, okay,” Steve says with a wry grin. “He didn’t know I was going to do this, he thought we were waiting for back up but I cuffed him to the car okay?”

Grace laughs, a surprised startled laugh. “You what?”

“I cuffed him to the steering wheel and threw the key in the back seat where he couldn’t reach,” Steve says with a bigger grin. “It was better for me to come alone. Your Dad’s not very stealth.”

“Yeah, he runs into things,” Grace says, grinning back. “I can always tell when he wakes up in the morning because he runs into his dresser and then curses at it.”

Steve suddenly clamps a hand over her mouth and looks out into the hallway and that’s when she can hear voices. “Gracie, I need you to do something for me,” Steve whispers. “I need you to put on my vest,” he says, taking off his bullet proof vest quickly and handing it to her, “and I need you to hold onto my shirt, and close your eyes, and just follow me wherever I go.”

She frowns down at the vest. “But you need this.”

He shakes his head. “No. You put it on, there’s not time for arguing Grace, but I’m even more stubborn than your father is, okay, I win my arguments with him, so can we just call this?”

She nods and puts on the vest and he fastens it, tightening things and velcroing things and tugging and shifting. Then he’s pressing a gun into the holster of her vest and she stares at him with wide eyes and an open mouth.

“You close your eyes, you hold onto my shirt and you follow me,” Steve says. “I mean it Gracie, eyes shut tight.”

“Why,” she asks.

“Because I am going to do whatever I need to to anyone between us and your Dad and I don’t want you to see it,” Steve says, looking away. “If I go down, you take that gun and you point it at anyone whose not your Dad and you pull the trigger, and you run, you got it?”

“I can’t… Uncle Steve, no, I can’t.”

“You can and you will, if you have to,” Steve says, catching her eye. “But you won’t have to, because I’ve got you right?”

She nods. “Right.”

“Eyes shut, Gracie,” he says, raising his eyebrows at her. “Okay? Please?”

“Okay,” she says, fisting her hands in the back of his shirt and squeezing her eyes shut. “They’re shut.”

“Right behind me,” Steve says, and then he starts moving.

She screams the first time he stops, shouts, and slams her against the wall as shots ring out once, twice, three times. He starts moving again though so she hangs on even tighter, burying her head into his back and blindly following whatever way he goes. He has to stop and reload and shoots another ten times.

She keeps her eyes squeezed shut tight the whole time but she trips over things and slips in other things and knows they’re bodies in pools of blood.

He stops short once after a shot from across the room and grunts, jerking against her. She crowds up behind him and feels wetness seeping onto her hand and knows he’s been shot. “Uncle Steve?”

“Eyes shut baby, hang on,” he says through gritted teeth, and then four more shots and he’s moving again.

When she hears a door bang open and feels wind on her face she opens her eyes as he reaches back and grabs her hand. She looks up at him and he grins this crazy gloating type of a grin, the same kind he gives her father when he beats him in scrabble, and waggles his eyebrows.

“Come on, it’s just around the corner.”

When they round the corner she sees her Dad sitting in a station wagon and shouting at absolutely no one, waving his free hand around like a crazy person. She wants so badly to hug him but Steve opens the back seat and shoves her in and she can see her Dad’s crystal blue eyes filled with tears as he pulls and yanks on his hands trying to pry them off of the wheel.

“Baby,” he’s saying. “Baby, are you okay, oh holy fucking hell you’re bleeding, baby, are you okay, talk to me, answer me!”

“Daddy it’s Uncle Steve’s blood,” she says, darting forward and hugging him around his neck from behind so hard she’s choking him. “Uncle Steve’s hurt, he’s bleeding a lot.”

Steve slides into the passenger seat pressing bloody fingers to a bloody shirt but grinning. “Drive, Danno.”

“You alright,” her dad asks, eyes on Steve. He reaches over and grabs his shirt and pulls it up and Grace sees a bullet hole right through his side. “Jesus, Steven.”

“Danny. Drive,” Steve says, smacking his hand away. “Go, God damnit, I think I got them all but we gotta go!”

Her dad puts pedal to the floor and they take off in a cloud of dust over the dirt roads and Grace leans back against the corduroy material of the ugly station wagon and wonders what the hell had to happen for her Dad to actually be driving this kind of piece of crap.

Oh right. She got kidnapped. She laughs to herself, more than a little hysterically. 

“Baby, you okay?”

“Fine,” she says, opening her eyes and looking at Steve. “Uncle Steve, are you gonna be okay?”

“I’m gonna be perfect sweetheart,” Steve says, but his face looks pale and there’s so, so, so much blood. “We just gotta get away from here and we’ll find a nice doctor and he’ll patch me right on up.”

“Now I know it’s bad if you’re asking for a doctor,” her father says in a low voice. “God damnit, Steven, what the hell were you thinking going in alone?”

Steve ignores him. “Gracie, sweetie, the handcuff key is in the back seat, can you find it and unlock your Dad’s hand?”

She ignores him and twists to look in the floorboard, seeing a towel down there and reaching down to grab it, balling it up and leaning between the two seats to pry Steve’s hand off of his stomach and replace it with the towel.

Then she looks for the key and finds it, leaning forward again to grab her Dad’s wrist and unlock his handcuff. “Daddy, I think Uncle Steve needs a hospital now.”

“I know baby,” her dad says, grabbing her hand and kissing it seven times in a row. “Did you tell your Uncle Steve thank you for saving you?”

Steve laughs. “I don’t need a thanks, your beautiful smile’s all I need.”

Grace can’t manage a smile right now but she makes a mental note to give him a thousand smiles later when she can. “How many people did you have to kill back there, Uncle Steve?”

She watches her dad and uncle exchange a look and then Steve looks at her. “That doesn’t matter. I did whatever I needed to do to get you out safe. That’s all that matters.”

“Can I give you your gun back now,” she asks.

“Gun,” her dad yells, wild eyes turning back to look at her. “Steven, did you give my baby girl a fucking _gun_?!”

“I had to be sure she could get out if I went down Danno,” Steve slurs, his eyes drooping before his head lolls back and his hands fall.

“Steve! Steven?” The car swerves on the road and her dad twists in his seat. “Steve!”

Grace lunges forward and presses onto the towel to keep pressure on the wound. “Daddy,” she asks tremulously. “Daddy, what do I do?”

“Just that baby,” he says, reaching over and feeling on Steve’s neck. “He’ll be okay babe, he’s got at least six of his nine lives left, there’s a hospital right up here.”

Three hours later Grace has been checked over and fussed over by the staff of the hospital and been fed, cleaned up, and fallen asleep in her dad’s lap as they waited for Steve to be stable enough to go and see.

When they get into his room finally he’s sitting up and grinning and she gives him the biggest possible smile she can manage, jumps up onto his hospital bed, and hugs the life out of him. She kisses his cheek four times in a row because Danno says one of her kisses are the best so four must be even better, and the way Steve laughs and holds her tight to him she knows she’s right.

“I’m still so angry with you,” her dad says, but he’s grinning and his eyes are teary and she knows just as well as Steve probably does that he’s not angry at all. “I cannot believe you handcuffed me to the steering wheel.”

“You’re a klutz, Dad,” Grace says, curling up on Steve’s side and hunkering down. She may be fourteen now but she figures after being held hostage for three days she’s allowed some reverting back to childhood. “He needed stealth.”

Her dad squawks in protest and Steve laughs long and loud, and she falls back asleep to the staccato rhythm of their bickering.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know that I could write an entire fic building up to this, but I just had to had to write this vision I saw in my head as a dream a few nights ago of Steve rescuing Grace and being so terrified of the prospect of her seeing him kill people.
> 
>  
> 
> You can find me on tumblr here under [@lovethesnark](http://lovethesnark.tumblr.com). 
> 
> Fanfiction Website  
> MOST of my fic is not on AO3, though all of my H5O and beyond is as AO3 didn't exist yet and it was too much to archive. It can be found on my website at [LoveTheSnark.com](http://www.lovethesnark.com).


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